In Selected Stories, Mark Harman gives us crisp new translations of Franz Kafka’s best novellas and tales and also a substantial scholarly introduction to his life and work. Like most biographers, he explores Kafka’s painful relations with his family, particularly his father, and his anxieties about marriage. The women in Kafka’s life – particularly his twice-rejected fiancée
Felice Bauer and his gifted Czech translator Milena Jesenská – are powerful presences. But Harman looks beyond Freudian family romance for insight. He sees Kafka as a man in search of transformative experience. Kafka tried to enlist during World War I; he reflected with increasing urgency on what it meant to be a Jew; he wrestled with philosophical and religious doubt. Set against all this, there was his absolute commitment to an ascetic writing life, which he sometimes feared was no life at all, making him a man made only of words, a literary fiction, truly absurd – and so in the midst of all these struggles he laughed, primarily at himself. Irony is thus the hallmark of his writing, with, as Harman says, ‘humour hidden in the interstices of his sentences’.

My first encounter with the writing of Anne Manne was ten years ago when I read The Life of I, her incomparable treatment of the various expressions of what she calls ‘the new culture of narcissism’. Some of the examples she adduces in that book are singularly monstrous – like the grandiose bloodlust of Anders Breivik or the sexual malevolence of Ariel Castro – while others are more like expressions of a dominant cultural logic, such as neoliberalism’s valorisation of self-sufficiency and the penalties it accordingly inflicts on both the vulnerable and those who care for them. But in each case she identifies a conspicuous failure of empathy, an incapacity (or perhaps unwillingness) to regard the moral reality of others such that it might present some constraint on the imposition of one’s will, some limit to the realisation of one’s designs.

Do gay men have a history – and, if so, what is it? Historians have grappled with such questions ever since Michel Foucault first published his History of Sexuality in the 1970s. The stakes are high because they are political: at root, they contest nature versus nurture. We know that men who have sex with other men have existed in every past society. But were those men the same as modern homosexuals? Many contemporary gays claim them as forerunners – yet several scholars see modern homosexuality as, fundamentally, a creation of contemporary late-stage capitalism and a chronological and cultural anomaly, whose associated rights may prove equally ephemeral.

In the introduction to Troubled Minds, authors Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam outline the territory they will cover, indicating that they are experts in psychology, psychiatry, and mental illness, with more than eighty years’ experience between them. They are wary of quick fixes (How to… books) and are also wary of professionals publishing in their own fields (potentially biased expertise). Fittingly, they see mental health and mental illness as complex. They have perceived a reader who is looking for a well-written, easy-to-comprehend book that spans conceptual diversity yet concentrates on ‘understanding’ both the ‘emotional and intellectual’ aspects of mental health and illness; one that emphasises contribution from the humanities as well as from science. They hope the book will assist those who first encounter people seeking mental health help (primary practitioners, counsellors, and others). Indeed, Troubled Minds is wonderfully written, highly readable and a tour de force from authors who have seamlessly brought their voices together.

On 27 August 1783, Jacques Charles launched the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight from the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower). He excluded his rival Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier from the ticketed reserve. Then, on 21 November, Charles and another ‘navigateur aérien’ made the first manned flight, landing thirty kilometres north of Paris. Montgolfier was invited to cut a ribbon as a gesture of reconciliation in the name of science.

In the year leading up to his death, the poet Robert Adamson (1943-2022) gathered together a selection of his work that focused on one of his enduring passions: the birds and fish of the Hawkesbury River, beside which Adamson lived much of his life. Adamson was best known for exploring this passion in poetry, but the pieces collected in this new book are works of prose and include selections from Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out (2004), and from his late collection, Net Needle (2015). They also include material that is likely to be less familiar to readers, pieces published in the magazine Fishing World, and extracts from a journal Adamson kept between 2015 and 2018 titled ‘The Spinoza Journal’.

On the surface, this encyclopedic work offers a gloriously lyrical exploration of the sea. It could be part of a recent shoal of books about the more-than-human world, limning the wondrous and astonishing. In Deep Water: The world in the ocean, whales learn rhyme-like patterns to remember their songs, a ‘babel of strange, eerie sounds: skittering blips, long cries, whoops and basso moans’. A loggerhead turtle travels more than 37,000 kilometres to return to her birthplace. Sharks’ chemo-receptors prove acute enough to detect blood ‘in amounts as low as one part in a million’. Port Jackson sharks socialise with their peers, and evidence emerges that some fish species use tools.

In the last decade, Stuart Kells has become one of Australia’s most versatile and fecund non-fiction writers, responsible for a variety of diverting histories, of enterprises, institutions, and ideas. His thoroughly readable The Library: A catalogue of wonders (2017) was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Award; his Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature (2018) felt rather more padded, if not unenjoyably so. Books about Argyle Diamonds (2021) and Melbourne University Publishing (2023) have been welcome. I imagine him in a medieval artisanal workshop, a kind of booksmith studiously occupied in multiple, simultaneous pursuits.

Let’s face it, quantum mechanics mystifies most of us. But as Quantum Drama shows, it baffled its creators, too – so much so that some of them turned to suicide, drink, or psychiatry (Carl Jung was a favourite). Who wouldn’t go crazy, trying to get their head around such bizarre happenings as subatomic particles sometimes being wave-like, and a theory that cannot tell you the particle’s definite state – its position and velocity, say – before you measure it? In ordinary ‘classical’ physics, by contrast, you can predict in advance every point on the trajectory of an ordinary object, such as a ball or a spacecraft, launched from any given place with any particular velocity. But quantum theory does not play by these long-established rules: until you observe the particle, all the theory can tell you are the chances it will show up at various places. As Einstein asked, ‘Do you really believe the Moon is only there when you look at it?’

The title of Omar Sakr’s latest collection references the Covid pandemic and comes from his prose poem ‘Diary of a Non-Essential Worker’. It also reminded me of Plato’s banning of the poets from his ideal republic, and Auden’s line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Throughout Non-Essential Work, Sakr explores the limits of poetry and its function in society, questioning the value of his own art, letting us in on his doubts. In the poem ‘Your People Your Problem’, he asks: ‘What is a song worth singing here? / The silenced are listening.’ Despite these doubts, or perhaps because of them, he has achieved a powerful collection of lyric poetry, simultaneously political and intimate.